Professor Stephen Broad is an islander in exile, researcher, teacher, community conductor and occasional broadcaster. He studied at the Music School of Douglas Academy (Piano with Anne Crawford and composition with William Sweeney) and then at the University of Glasgow, where he won prizes in music and physics. He undertook a DPhil in Historical Musicology at Worcester College, Oxford with the late Robert Sherlaw Johnson and with Annegret Fauser, and is Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Dr Laura Bissell (she/her) is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Laura is a performance-researcher, writer, and educator and has had her poetry, creative writing and academic writing published in journals and anthologies. She is currently writing a monograph on matrescence and performance (Intellect) and is co-editing the International Journal of Performance Art and Digital Media’s special edition: Matrescence and Media with Jodie Hawkes and Elena Marchevska.
Colin Broom is a composer based in Scotland, UK. He studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama (now RCS). Colin is Jazz Coordinator at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and teaches both in the Composition and Creative & Contextual Studies departments.
Born and raised in Alaska, Joshua arrived in Scotland in 1992 to study Scottish Gaelic at the University of Aberdeen (MA, 1996). He then undertook doctoral research in the history of the piping tradition of the southern Outer Hebrides at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh (PhD, 2001), now published under the title When Piping WasStrong: Tradition, Change and the Bagpipe in South Uist (John Donald, 2006).
Dr Emily Doolittle is a composer and researcher with an ongoing interest in the relationship between human music and animal songs, which she explores through music, writing, and in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists. Other research interests include environmental activism through the arts, interdisciplinarity, music and gender, musical storytelling, and folklore. Originally from Canada, Doolittle has been an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at RCS since 2017.
Dr Rachel Drury is a researcher and creative artist working in the field of music psychology and therapeutic arts. She is Co-programme Lead for the MA Psychology in the Arts (Music) programme at the RCS and the music specialist for Rachel House Children’s Hospice in Kinross (CHAS).
David Fennessy (b.1976, Ireland) is a composer based in Glasgow who teaches composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. His music is performed regularly by ensembles and orchestras both home and abroad and has been recorded on the NMC, Naxos and Ensemble Modern labels. He is published in Vienna by Universal Edition.
Dr Fabrice Fitch is a composer and musicologist specializing in Renaissance polyphony and its performance. His monograph Johannes Ockeghem: Masses and Models (Paris, 1997) remains the only full-length book in English on the composer. His most recent monograph is the widely acclaimed Renaissance Polyphony (Cambridge, 2020), part of the Cambridge University Press ‘Introductions to Music’ series. He is a member of the editorial boards of Early Music and the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and has been a reviewer with Gramophone for 30 years. His compositions, focusing mostly on chamber music and works for soloists, have been recorded and broadcast internationally.
Member of the Academic Board & Risk Management Group
Lois has extensive experience in HE curriculum design, innovation and review and institutional review, as well as issues and leadership in quality assurance and enhancement and academic management.
Professor Laura González’s work inhabits the space between medical humanities, psychoanalysis, performance and Eastern thought. She has written on the seductive qualities of a lemon squeezer (2010), and has co-edited collections of essays on art and madness (2013) and on care (2018). She is the author of ‘Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces’ (2016) and ‘The Hysteric: Outline of a Figure’ (with Dr Eleanor Bowen, 2023). She has published book chapters on transposition (2018) inter-semiotic translation (2019), her maternal line (2019), breath (2020) and ghosts (2021). She has translated Freud’s case histories into performance and is currently exploring the dramaturgical potential of a breath practice.
Professor Steve Halfyard is Head of BMus programmes at RCS. Their research is mainly focused on music in horror/supernatural and superhero film and TV, and publications include Danny Elfman’s Batman: a film score guide (Scarecrow Press, 2004), Sounds of Fear and Wonder: Music in Cult TV (IB Tauris, 2016) and the edited collections Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Ashgate, 2010), Music in Fantasy Cinema (Equinox, 2012) and, with Nicholas Reyland, The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Peak TV (Palgrave 2024). Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was awarded the Whedon Studies Association’s ‘Long Mr Pointy’ for the best book in Whedon Studies in 2010, and the chapter on music in Buffy in Sounds of Fear and Wonder won the ‘Short Mr Pointy’ for 2016. Steve is a series editor for the Palgrave Studies in Television Music and Sound series.
Dr Sarah Hopfinger is a Lecturer in Research at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She is a practitioner-researcher with specialisms in disability dance, chronic pain and crip theory, ecological performance, and intergenerational practice.
Roy Howat studied at the RSAMD and Cambridge University, where his doctorate formed the basis of his 1983 book Debussy in proportion. He combines international concert performance with research, which has included revelations about musical structure, performing and editorial issues. Among his publications are acclaimed critical editions of major works by Debussy, Fauré, Chopin and Chabrier, the book The Art of French Piano Music, chapters in numerous other books, and a wide range of CD recordings.
Dr Stuart MacRae is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Recent concert works include Courante, written for The Dunedin Consort and premiered at the 2019 BBC Proms, and Prometheus Symphony for two singers and orchestra, premiered at the 2019 Lammermuir Festival.
Alistair MacDonald’s research explores ideas of estrangement and resistance through composition and performance using field recording, live audio processing and interactive systems. Much of his work is collaborative and takes the form of standalone electroacoustic works, fixed compositions for instruments, improvisations with musicians from a number of genres, film, dance and gallery installation. Alistair supervises several practice-based and theory-led research students including composers, cross-disciplinary artists and performers.
Dr Karen McAulay is a musicologist & educationalist. She curated music materials at RCS from 1988- June 2024 as a Performing Arts Librarian, but since then has concentrated solely on her research activities. She was conferred with a Fellowship of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in November 2024.
Karen’s PhD is in Music, from the University of Glasgow (2009). Her first book, Our Ancient National Airs: Scottish Song Collecting from the Enlightenment to the Romantic Era, was published by Ashgate in 2013, and her second book was published by Routledge in late 2024: A Social History of Amateur Music-Making and Scottish National Identity: Scotland’s Printed Music, 1880-1951.
Dr Jill Morgan holds a PhD in Music Psychology from the University of Edinburgh and has extensive experience as an educator and piano accompanist. She has published research and peer reviewed articles in academic journals, alongside presenting her work at national and international conferences. Current research interests include the impact of music in education, wellbeing and in the social world.
Professor Arnold Myers is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a Professor Emeritus of the University of Edinburgh; he serves as President of the Galpin Society. His Edinburgh University doctorate developed acoustically based techniques for taxonomic classification of brass instruments.
Head of Guitar and Harp; Interim Deputy Director of Music
Learn about Professor Allan Neave
Professor Allan Neave
Head of Guitar and Harp; Interim Deputy Director of Music
Professor Allan Neave, Interim Deputy Director of Music, studied at the RSAMD (1984) and the RNCM (1988) and since then has been performing worldwide. He is a regular guest at many of the world’s leading musical events and has worked with many influential musicians including Nikita Koshkin, Edward McGuire, Hans Werner Henze, Gordon McPherson and Stephen Dodgson.
Fali Pavri enjoys a busy and varied career as soloist, chamber musician and teacher. Born in Mumbai, India, where his first teacher was Shanti Seldon, he studied the piano at the Moscow Conservatoire with Professor Victor Merzhanov and at the Royal Academy of Music, London with Christopher Elton.
Dr Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland is a Lecturer in Historical Musicology at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and has a particular interest in the field of historically informed performance and eighteenth-century studies. Her most recent publications include Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing Scandalous Lessons (2022), Allan Ramsay’s The Tea Table Miscellany co-edited with Professor Murray Pittock (2023), and Credulity in the Age of Reason: Rhetoric, Epistemologies, Education, (2024). Brianna is the PI for Scotland’s Singing for Health Network, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the RCS Innovation Studio and the Founders Fund for Creatives. She was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney in 2017 and 2019 and was the BSECS-Georgian Papers Fellow in 2023.
Professor Ailie Robertson is a multi-award-winning Scottish composer/harpist who has been commissioned by some of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions including BBC Proms, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Cappella Nova, Exaudi and the Riot Ensemble. She is currently composer-in-residence with Sound Festival and Glyndebourne Orchestra. She was awarded the “Achievement in New Music” prize at the Scottish Awards for New Music.
Oliver is Head of Composition at RCS. He has written a wide variety of works for many professional, amateur, youth and theatre organisations, which have been broadcast and performed around the world, and is interested in developing new environments for new music, collaborating with other artists and organisations to find ways to communicate to new audiences.
Dr Marc Silberschatz holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and an MA with Distinction in Classical and Contemporary Text (Directing). Since 2004, he has directed over thirty productions in New York, Scotland and England.
Since settling in the United Kingdom in 1984, Aaron Shorr has established an international career as soloist, chamber musician and educator. As well as appearing as soloist at London’s South Bank in over thirty concertos, he has toured extensively as a recitalist and chamber musician worldwide.
Smith studied at Berklee, USA with financial assistance from Sean Connery; has recorded over thirty solo albums; toured 50+ countries; composed over 300 works; collaborated with poet laureates and visual artists; holds a Professorship; three Doctorates (Heriot-Watt, Glasgow Caledonian, Edinburgh Universities); awards from the BBC, British, UK Parliament, Scottish Jazz; and an OBE for services to jazz and education from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Jess Thorpe is a Lecturer in the Arts in Justice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she designs and delivers creative projects in prisons and with communities impacted by the criminal justice system.
Outside her work at RCS, Jess was the Associate Director (Engage) of Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre (2020-2024). She is Co-Artistic Director of Glass Performance, through which she also developed long-term initiatives such as young people’s performance company Junction 25 and Polmont Youth Theatre, the first youth theatre in a Scottish prison. In 2015, Junction 25 won a CATS Whiskers for an outstanding contribution to Scottish theatre. Jess has published several works on theatre including ‘A Beginners Guide to Devising Theatre’ (for Methuen) which won a Drama and Education prize in 2021.
Dr J Simon van der Walt is a composer and Head of Taught Postgraduate Programmes in Music at the Conservatoire. His artistic research inhabits a broad span of work, ranging from score-based composition to installation, sound art, and devised musiktheater. Current preoccupations include Indonesian gamelan music, live coding in SuperCollider, and reconstructing the career of his fictional alter ego Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards, unsung hero of British light music electronica.
David Watkin is fascinated by the interplay between the harmonic and decorative layers in tonal music. His recording of the Bach Suites won both Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine Awards. He revived the C18th cellists’ technique of improvised chordal accompaniment and wrote about this in relation to Corelli (Early Music). He explored C19th HIPP with the Eroica Quartet and CUP published his “Beethoven and the Cello”.
Bethany’s research focuses on the cultural and social analysis of participatory dance and dance organisations, often through ethnographic means. Since 2015, research activity has been closely tied to the Engagement work of Scottish Ballet, focused in two areas: a) Dance for Health, working with dancers with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s, and b) education opportunities for professional ballet and contemporary company dancers in the UK.
